“And now, my brother Ken!” The words were like a call.

“Oh, let me off!” Raymond tried to speak lightly.

“No, indeed!  The safety of my family is at stake!”

Raymond was inwardly angry, but he sat down and defiantly spread his hands.

Joan regarded them silently for a dramatic moment, then she quietly opened her own.

“Isn’t this odd,” she said, “there is a line in your hand and mine—­alike!”

Every eye was fixed on the four hands.

“Right here——­” Joan traced it.

“What does it mean?” Martin asked.

“Capacity for friendship; that we are rather daring; not afraid of many things—­but canny enough to know——­”

“What, Joan?—­out with it!” It was Doris who spoke.

“Canny enough—­to distrust ourselves once in awhile.”

Martin gave a guffaw.

“Joan,” he said, “you ought to be sent to bed.  Your eyes are too big and your colour too high.  Stop this foolishness and let us take a turn on the river road.  The moonlight is filling it—­it’s too rare to be overlooked.”

So they went out, keeping together and talking happily until it was time to return to the house; there, Raymond managed to say to Joan, just as they were parting: 

“This has been rather a shock, you know, I wish I could see you alone—­for a moment.”

She looked up at him, and all the mad daring was gone from her eyes.

“Is there anything to say?” she whispered.  “Now or—­ever?”

“Yes.”

And Raymond knew that Joan would come back.

He sat on the broad porch, opening to The Gap, and smoked.  The house grew still with that holy quietness that holds all love safe.

Then came a slight noise; someone was coming!

It was significant that Raymond should know at once who it was.  All the love and yearning in the world would not have drawn Nancy through the sleeping house to him.  The knowledge made him smile grimly, happily.

Doris, once having said good-night, meant it, and Martin had gone to his bungalow.

“Well—­here I am.”  Joan appeared and sat down, looking as if she were doing the most commonplace thing in life.  It was the old daring that had led to dangerous ways.

“Is it—­safe?”

“Why not?” It was the same frank, childlike look.

“But—­Nancy; your Aunt——­”

Joan twisted her mouth humorously.

“We’ll have to risk them—­you said you had something to say.”

“Joan!  Good Lord! but it’s great to have a name to call you by—­you drove me pretty hard to-night.  I make no complaint—­except——­” He paused.

“For Nancy?” Joan asked.

“Yes!  Joan, she’s wonderful.  She’s the sort that makes a man rather afraid until he realizes that he means to keep her as she is—­forever.”  This was spoken with a definiteness of purpose that made Joan recoil.  Again he was defending Nancy from what he had believed Joan to have been!